Best of rhymes

Poetry slam's heated finale features flights of fancy, wars of words, winners, losers, security guards with a message ---- and the delights of Navy Pier

August 11, 2003|By Chris Jones, Tribune arts reporter.

Jostled by stressed bridesmaids and sharp-edged strollers and blinking in the early-evening sun like clubbers surprised by the dawn, some thin, noir-clad poets were kvetching with e-l-o-n-g-a-t-e-d style Saturday night on Navy Pier.

"This is a carn-i-val atmosphere and our sound is going nowhere, nowhere," moaned one wordsmith to a pal just before the grand finals of the 2003 National Poetry Slam on Navy Pier's Skyline Stage.

Then the fellow scowled with poetic menace at a cheery-looking caramel-corn stand, and hummed an ironic circus tune between and underneath his words. "Your heav-y, se-ri-ous, po-lit-ical stuff is never gonna fly here, man."

Wrong. It flew with fresh wings. As the finals -- and the slam-- illustrated, poets are so loud and angry these days that they can drown out Lake Michigan.

Poetry slamming may have been a direct, energetic affair when Marc Smith invented the genre at Chicago's Green Mill lounge years ago, but it's positively hyperkinetic these days, fueled by rap and hip-hop influences and the ever-growing need to shout louder and louder in America to have any hope of being heard. There's now a national slam organization, which sponsored a five-day event last week in Chicago, replete with workshops for senior poets, classes in memorization techniques, an erotica slam, a prop slam, and -- for those bursting to channel the dead poets -- a cover slam.

This year, more than 60 cities were entered in the team competition, in which teams of four poets compete in free-form rounds and try to impress judges selected at random from the audience. The judges hold up scores, ice-skating style.

Granted, the notion of an open-air poetry slam on the Pier -- rather than in the shadowy confines of a club like Metro or the Subterranean -- evoked some incongruities. At one surreal point on Saturday night on the McPier, a massive, nasty-looking fellow waddled by, wearing a shirt emblazoned on the rear with the words "Security" and "National Poetry Slam." On the front were the words: "You've Had Your Three Minutes, Now Sit Down And Shut Your Piehole."

At Saturday's finals, the judges included a warehouse worker and a statistician. Smith, the host of the night and a man clearly concerned about balancing competition with the egalitarian glories of the word, reveled in the judges' amateur status. "Her qualification," he said of the statistician, "is that she is not qualified."

Still, the scoring is taken very seriously, with low scores greeted by screeching hostility from the audience. "The funny thing," grinned Smith down the microphone as one hapless judge turned in a low score, "is that you'll have to walk all the way back to the door at the end of the night."

The packed national finals were a culminating faceoff between impressive teams from Oakland, Austin, Tex., Los Angeles and NewYork. This was not a celebration of the introspective. With a packed and vocal audience, the format favors the bon mot as weapon, the zinged invective, the pause suddenly shattered by revelation.

Disinclined to muse on the aesthetic merits of Grecian urns, these poets prefer grand poetic pronouncements on nationhood, politics, race, identity, the perils of mass culture, the lessons of the ancestors.

"My eyes are perpetually blistered," declared Sekou the Misfit of L.A., with nary a shred of irony, "because it is my job to stare into the center of the sun."

"I write for those who don't have a voice," said Prentice of Oakland. "I write for those who feel they don't have a choice/but to accept the cards they are dealt in life."

The slammers allowed precious few digressions into personal travails. A vulnerable-seeming poet named Genevieve Van Cleve of Austin talked about former teachers and the pathetic state of sex education: "I still thought," she remembered, "that `Little Red Corvette' was a song about a car." But Van Cleve -- who also somehow emoted the line "she patted her gigantic hairspray and told her a lot of things"-- was the exception.

For most of these guys, confession meant feeling the burden ("sometimes the words at night, they chase after me," moaned Sekou, briefly), and most of the issues on display Saturday night were decidedly macro. The nature of America was fought over, a white poet wrote about a black man, black poets floated and deconstructed the N-word all night long, women probed gender.

"Today I was reincarnated as a woman," said Scorpio Bone of Oakland. "I just wanna be seen by y'all/ Seen for what I truly am."

"We don't need no maximum-minimum security," said the team from Austin, "We need more loving fathers and mothers."

"There can be no One Nation Under God unless that nation is the world," said the team from L.A., "for God made the world." Of all the lines all night, that one hit home the most with an uber-liberal crowd harboring hopeless dreams of a slammin' poet in the White House.

As a result, Sekou the Misfit, Rives, Steve Connel and Javon the Golden Child of L.A. were the winners and got $2,000. It was good judging. They seemed the most in tune with the crowd.

"Words are like actions," said the loud and angry poets from L.A., as the crowd on Navy Pier screeched and hollered like poets suddenly thrust into a fantasy world where the microphones are always on, ears always open, ideas always being openly expressed. "They define you."